Erin's Journals

Just a thought… In the middle of difficulty comes opportunity. [John Archibald Wheeler (often misattributed to know-it-all Albert Einstein)]

I’m constantly surprised and delighted by how helpful people are. Today’s one example; the other came on Friday thanks to social media.

Rob and I volunteer at a local seniors’ centre, having signed up during the worst of Covid. People couldn’t or didn’t want to leave their homes for groceries, so the centre made delicious and nutritious meals and once a week we’d drop them off. Meals were priced according to income and ability to pay; the best part was that we met our beloved friend Mira, who despite passing last fall, still has a firm grasp on our hearts. We continue to deliver now, but to far fewer clients, as demand has slowed.

When we found ourselves with dilation eye appointments today as we both look into vision improvement surgery, we were in a pickle: no driving home from Victoria, about a 40 minute trip from our town of Sidney. So we called the Shoal Centre and asked if, by any chance, someone was going into the city today . Long story short, the answer was “yes” and we have a ride! We’ll tuck a Tim’s gift card into our thank you note, and then take a couple of buses home.

The second instance came thanks to dozens upon dozens of comments from people when I attached this cartoon to a post on Facebook and other social media Friday.

I said that we are indeed at the end of our ropes, having had our BC dream house on the market for a year now with no offers. There were some common themes in the responses.

1. Lower the Price Done, done, done and done. With our agent, we’ve searched the comparables. A lot. We’re well below the assessed value (which we ended up successfully appealing) and absolutely in the right price range. Any of the 90(!) or so parties who’ve been through have not mentioned that it’s too high. So there’s that.

2. Change Agents We really don’t want to do that, as we feel the man handling our listing has held many open houses, marketed the place throughout Canada and the US, and done just about everything we thought possible to try to sell this recently-renovated home. We didn’t search for an agent when we went to sell; it was he through whom we bought the condo we’re now in and he had helped sell our kids-in-law’s house in a day. We thought we were in good hands.

3. Get the Right Saint! I said initially that we had St. Anthony planted (upside down as instructed) in the front yard. Well, of course, it’s St. Joseph (bad Catholic, Erin!) but honestly these days, the patron saint of hopeless causes might be of more use. Hey St. Jude: take a sad house and make it better!

Many people suggested I attach the listing on Facebook and other socials to get more eyes on it. See, here’s where the personal and the private get murky. We’ve been extremely fortunate to be able to afford a house in this price range and I am reluctant to share what that price is. Now if you were to search realtor.ca and look up a home on Park Pacific Terrace in North Saanich, well I couldn’t stop you. But the last thing I need is some Bitter Betty coming after me for something. I have enough of that taste in my mouth right now already.

So, what to do? I realize these are what they used to call “first world problems” and I’m not moaning. Bridge financing is expensive and hard; we didn’t have to buy the condo when we saw it (it’s a rarity in the building that we liked) but we did have to get out of a house that now brought nothing but sadness after so much joy. (There’s the personal. But it’s no secret.) What we’re having so much trouble with – besides eating the monthly interest on that loan – is that the house we walked into and said, “THIS IS IT!” doesn’t seem to have grabbed anyone else the same way.

The 150 degree views of trees, ocean and mountains. The eagles and deer and rabbits (and occasionally, as you see here, Snowbirds) and the quiet. Maybe it’s the blessed isolation of the neighbourhood on what’s called a mountain (but with paved roads and mail delivery LOL). We’re out of ideas as to what it is. The market? A looming recession? Three pertinent elections? Who knows?

Would we move back? Not now that we’ve embraced walking across the street for groceries or almost anything else we need (except cataract surgery with the doctor our optometrist recommended). It’s finding the right people to start their own dreams – maybe immigrants to the States moving again, but to our beautiful country to practise medicine (as so many will be after their US visas expire July 1). Maybe another couple from Ontario who need to start their new next chapter.

A friend whose house just sold after listing at the same time as ours says, “There’s a bum for every seat.” I’m just hoping someone’s bum gets in gear and they find ours. The chairs are pointed at the ocean.

Have a great week and I’ll write to you next Monday after a long overdue visit to see my dad, and be reunited with my three sisters. The Coven collects – watch for strange cloud formations!

Just a thought… The kid in you isn’t gone…. They’re just waiting for you to come back out. Give it to them. Often. [Carlos Whittaker @loswhit]

Seems like forever since I’ve written here; I guess I just needed some time to sit and think…and here we go!

As we live so far away from our grandkids, the highlights of both Rob’s and my week are updates on what they’re busy doing. 10-year-old Colin is killing it in his little league baseball, slugging homers, pitching winning games and helping out in the field and on base where he can. So far his team is 6-0-1 on the season, and Rob proudly takes a tiny bit of the credit for the time he spent in the yard playing baseball and hockey with them when the kids lived here.

While Jane, who’s five, is climbing the ladder of belts in her karate classes and loving it, it’s what she does while Colin’s lighting up the scoreboard that made me think of something I wanted to share today.

No matter where her brother’s team is playing, at home or away, Jane comes along with Mom and Dad (who both take turns coaching, too). No sooner have Brooke and Phil found a place to park than Jane is off like a shot to the nearby fields or playgrounds. And here’s what is so normal at her age, but so exceptional as we get older: she just finds other kids to play with. They say “hi,” ask if the other likes to play this or that (sometimes not even bothering to inquire), and then they basically play their brains out for as long as it takes Colin’s team to finish a game.

Hearing about her social butterfly attitude made me wistful for those days: the freedom just to run and do and laugh, to feel completely unfettered by shyness and judgment. But now as grown-ups, imagine how different our lives would be if we saw people having fun and just joined in!

I can count almost on one hand the number of times I’ve done that as an adult and I never, ever regretted it. Whether it’s singing along with people who are busking or are just strumming on a guitar outdoors, taking part in a rights march as we did in Seattle in 2017, or simply saying “why not?” to whatever looks like fun, the feeling of joining in without worrying how it looks or what people will say is simply liberating.

Just think of what we’d do if we didn’t care what others thought: you’d join that choir or walking/cycling group, audition for the play or sit with a stranger for coffee. The latter is what my podcast partner Lisa Brandt and I did this past final winter in California: we joined a woman who had a bike helmet on the table and was enjoying a brew by herself. Simply by asking and then sitting and talking with her, we learned that she lived across the street from Adam Sandler in LA, and that her swimming pool was filled with ashes from the fires that she’d come to Palm Springs to escape (the house on which she’d recently been refused homeowner’s insurance was uninhabitable). 

I wonder how she’s doing….

These conversations and experiences, these connections, only come when we nudge ourselves out of our comfort zones. Whether it’s joining clubs, walking the streets of your own town or city, or even meeting someone online, the importance of taking chances, quieting those voices of judgment that we have heard most of our lives (some of us, even as children), and treating every day is if it’s our last, has to be driven home.

So I’ll leave you with these slides from a piece I stumbled upon yesterday on threads.com. (I’m there @erindawndavis if you care to join this gentler social platform). I hope they resonate with you as they did with me. And just maybe they’ll remind you that life is short, but summer is shorter and if you don’t do it this year, what are you waiting for?

Just a thought… Drink Coffee! Do stupid things faster and with more energy! [Darynda Jones]

Well, we made it through a Mother’s Day/Lauren’s 10^th anniversary double hit yesterday. Deep breath, full heart, and on we go.

As I told you last week, in the days leading up to May 11^th I’m often looking for signs that Lauren is still with us. By now, like good golf shots, there are just enough to keep us going, but not enough, never enough, in the long run.

So let me tell you about a few this past week, and my futile and funny attempt to make one happen.

Knowing we’d be away (up island in Courtenay, BC) for our own long weekend, I visited Lauren’s bench at a park in Sidney to spend a few minutes, listen to her sing in my Air Pods, and just be with her.

As I left, I thought how nice it would be if she’d make herself known to me.

While briskly strolling home, I saw something I hadn’t yet seen on a walk this spring: a little bunny on someone’s lawn. I stopped and said, “Hi, Flower,” using one of the nicknames we called Lauren. I know Flower was the skunk in Bambi, but since we don’t have skunks on the island, I decided in that moment that the bunny was my “hello” from Lauren, and was happy with that.

Then, a few blocks closer to home, I looked down. There on the road was a crushed carton. It took a second to register, but the brand on it was a version of that nickname, that we’d shortened to rhyme, not with “show,” but with “how.” Here it is:

A clearer, louder sign, or just a flattened carton? Look, when you’re starving and you’re offered a crust, you don’t ask for a croissant.

So on the weekend, after two futile attempts to charge our EV in Campbell River at uncooperative stations, we drove further out of town to a Shell station. Once we’d plugged in, we wandered into the gas station store. I decided that maybe we were led by those two other exasperating chargers to that place we’d never have stopped, so that I would buy a winning lottery ticket.

Well here’s where the sublime turned into the ridiculous: I had absolutely NO idea how to go about choosing my numbers or playing 6/49. I thought: People do this regularly. How hard can it be? but nope – I was literally clueless. Fortunately there was a lovely cashier who came over to the kiosk and tried to explain it to me; using numbers special to Rob and to me, I ended up ticking off enough for about $60 worth of tickets – HARD NO! – and finally left with three nights’ worth of draws.

Now this is where I should tell you that I awoke yesterday, that heaviest day on our calendar, to learn we were ten million dollars richer. Uh, no. Not even one number. But the good news is, I have two more chances to lose!

Somehow in my life I’ve missed out on learning the basics; How to put a loonie into the right cart at the store (did it on Friday and placed the coin in the cart ahead, so I had conjoined carts until I ran to the car to get another coin); How to do self-checkout without having to get assistance while I melt down with embarrassment; How to buy a damned (in every way possible) lottery ticket.

I figure when stupid stuff happens, as it always does to me, it’ll be a good laugh on the podcast. And if you missed last week’s “fart-walking” topic, you can still listen and have a wonderful cleansing laugh yourself. Just go to gracefullyandfrankly.com and join Lisa Brandt and me. Between the two of us we have stories in which you’ll see yourself, or be darned glad you don’t! Have a gentle week and I’ll be back with you after the long weekend next Tuesday.

Just a thought… As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them. [John F. Kennedy]

I’ll start this week’s blog by suggesting that if you want all of the tea on what happened an entire, eternal week ago on our election day, please listen to Ep. 124 by going to gracefullyandfrankly.com. It’s free, 30 minutes long and I promise it’ll be worth your time; subscribe so you don’t miss an episode!

Today I’ll focus, not on the week past, but the week ahead. And I don’t know where to go with this except to say thank-you.

This Sunday, Mother’s Day, as fate would have it every five or six years, marks a bottomless crevasse in our lives and lands on May 11th: ten years since we got that call that our Lauren had died in her sleep at 24.

So much has happened in those years that I can barely list them:

Her son Colin, who that day turned seven months old, has grown into a wonderful tall boy (with men’s size ten feet!) whose passions are baseball and Leafs playoff hockey, who is funny, beautiful, sensitive and a wonderful big brother to the sister who is five years his junior but will always be our equally-loved grandchild, a gift of Lauren’s widower Phil’s second marriage to Brooke. So many blessings.

That joy was magnified exponentially when their little foursome moved west five years ago to just a few minutes’ drive from us, in our new home of British Columbia. We had left Ontario a year after Lauren’s passing, ready to make a fresh start and close the door on broadcasting, while opening several in the world of podcasting. Rob’s and my reWirement activities continue gently and with more than our share of satisfaction.

After four years of missing family and the life they had, Colin, Jane and their folks moved back to Ontario last summer, and in that time of healing on our part, Rob and I have relocated away from a sprawling house surrounded by tall trees and often visited by deer, to a sweet little town and an oceanside condo, where our telescope is poised to capture orcas. Haven’t seen one yet, but our walks are dotted with seals, eagles, outrageously beautiful vistas and lots of other little dogs. Oh yes – we said good-bye to Pepper and Molly after their full and happy lives, and brought Dottie and Livi into our home, finding love where we can get it and give it.

Ten years ago when well-meaning people told me that time helps, I found it almost offensive, like one of the “at leasts” that I caution people from using in my book Mourning Has Broken: Love, Loss and Reclaiming Joy. Oh yes, I wrote a #1 Globe and Mail bestselling memoir about our experiences, what we learned and how there is a hope for joy down the road after experiencing so much trauma and pain. It wasn’t a “how to” as much as a “how we did it,” with lessons to take or leave, but mostly to let people know that they are not alone in whatever they feel at any moment of grief, in the myriad ways in which it presents itself.

I have experienced so much in the aftermath of writing that book and continue to share what little wisdom I can, when people who’ve read it write to me. Most recently it was a bereaved mom who had lost her beautiful adult son. I told her, in an analogy that came to me recently, that it’s like how in the course of our lives we often gain 20, 30 or 40 pounds. Now, if that was in a backpack, our younger selves might find it unbearable to carry, day in and day out. But our bodies adjust and that burden becomes a part of us. It’s the nearest thing I can think of that’s the least bit original when it comes to how we, as the Beatles put it, “Carry That Weight.” You just learn how. You shift, you struggle, but you live your life as best you can until you decide it’s perhaps time to put some of that heaviness aside. Or not.

As we begin our second decade without the daughter we had for only 24 years, Rob and I continue to try to live in a way that we hope would make her proud.

I found sobriety (thanks to six weeks in rehab) nearly six years ago, and am working at it one day at a time. Rob and I have our sad days but they are fewer; I’ve bent the ear of more than one good therapist, and know to seek help when I need it, instead of drowning my feelings and making them worse. I’m grateful not to have allowed anger to eat me alive. We accept that which we cannot change. And every day I keep looking for that pony in the manure pile. It’s got to be in there somewhere, right?

Most of all, I’m grateful for the kindness, damp shoulders and bent ears that Rob and I have both encountered in the past decade, many times from people like you. We try to give it back wherever we can, and be the parents that Lauren deserved.

Sometimes it all feels like a dream, from beginning to end. Was she really here? Who are we now, and why? But we know we’re not alone and, this Sunday, as always, we’ll keep our eyes and hearts open for signs that she’s here. I wish you a Happy Mother’s Day and thank you once again. I can’t say that enough.

Just a thought… The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

We begin with heartfelt thoughts of sorrow and compassion for the people of Vancouver who lost family and are suffering today in light of Saturday night’s tragedy at a Filipino festival on an otherwise perfect spring evening. Our hearts are with you. Nagsisi kami ng husto. We are so sorry.

Today I am Switzerland. No pins or hats, no political chats; I’m setting it all aside as somebody helping my fellow countrywomen and men to vote.

After weeks of campaigning for the first time, and doing my small part to help our local candidate unseat a popular incumbent and give our area a stronger voice in Ottawa, I decided that rather than wait around all day for results, I’d do something else I’d never done before this year: sign up with Elections Canada.

The idea only occurred to me last Thursday. I did so online, not really thinking that at the last minute they’d have a cancellation. But they did, and I got a call Friday asking me to come to a three-and-a-half hour training session that very afternoon. I was up for a convertible ride, and free for a few hours, and said, “Sure!”

Of the ten men and women there, I was the oldest (and here I thought our riding was filled with young seniors like me, wanting to fill their hours). I surmised that some were students just adding a bit to their bank accounts, but others perhaps felt that, like me, they wanted to do their part in these days of national pride and unity.

I left the learning session feeling informed and ready for my job as an Information Officer today: basically I’ll be greeting voters as they come in out of the rain to cast their ballots, making sure they have their voter cards/ID/driver’s license or any other card issued by a Canadian government with photo, name and current address. If any of that is unclear to you reading this today, just go to Elections.ca and your answers will be there. Or bring whatever you have on hand and/or someone who knows you and is also voting at that site to vouch for you. We’ll have you covered.

I have to be there today for 6 am (ugh), as polls here open promptly one hour later. Then after they close at 7 pm in our area, I may be called upon to take part in witnessing or tallying votes as they are individually brought out of a heretofore sealed box, opened and announced. Check your local hours, as they differ across Canada.

There is so much I didn’t know about how election days work. We take it all for granted, don’t we? I came out of training Friday relieved that in our federal elections we use good ol’ fashioned paper ballots and pencils or pens (a voter’s choice) and tally them by hand in front of witnesses. No voting machines or computers that can be hacked; just humans doing their absolute best to uphold this sacred right and rite of a democratic country.

Today I’m putting aside my partisan hopes for the voting outcome. My job is to be neutral, including not wearing any major party’s colours of red, blue, orange, green or purple (yes, that’s a hard and fast rule), to be polite and helpful wherever I can, to answer questions, to pass people on to those folks who have the needed info, and probably to sit…a lot. Yes, I’m bringing my enVy Pillow but I don’t think they’d appreciate my Nespresso maker.

You see, our riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands saw Canada’s second-largest turnout in advance polls Easter weekend. First was in Poilievre’s riding of Carleton, where Liberal Bruce Fanjoy is hoping to fire the incumbent Conservative leader. But in that riding, the poor Elections Canada workers will truly be earning their $20 an hour: thanks to the Longest Ballot Committee, some 90 candidates are on the ticket. Who knows when those votes will all be tallied?

Personally, I’ll be glad not to have to be vigilant to keep trolls off my Facebook page when this week is over and the political temperature across the nation somewhat returns to normal. Hopefully we’ll ALL come out tomorrow ready to face whatever insanity floods towards us from the US, standing together for a strong and united Canada.

As for tomorrow…as Rob and I, along with thousands of other involved Canadians head out to gather up candidates’ signs from the sites they were placed or delivered (the rules say it has to be tomorrow), we’ll be thankful to have had a chance once again to make our voices heard, to have actively taken part in this precious process for the first time, and, most of all, to be Canadian.

Elbows Up, my friend – and may the best candidates win.